Au Revoir Scotland, Hello England

Hi Everybody,

Our black and white house among the trees

It’s been a while, right? No good wishing you Happy New Year as it’s almost April. I can’t believe it has taken us this long to move ourselves from south west Scotland to north Devon and begin to settle in. The photo above shows our house built into rock on the hillside, with one of Devon’s typical narrow winding roads leading up to our front gate, part of our elevated garden and the entrance to our back door on the lower right. I don’t know why it looks like a dark tunnel down there, lol. It must have been the time of day it was taken. It’s not dark at all, though it is shaded by trees.

Far below us is the River Lyn and the village that follows the river to the sea. You can hear the river all the time from our house. I am trying to get used to its constant whooshing sound. From indoors, it sounds as if it is always raining.

We don’t have sandy beaches here, unfortunately, just stony ones.

Photo of the beach near the harbour taken by my son, Tobin Layton, when he visited us this month

Apologies to the people who joined us after Christmas and didn’t hear anything from me after that. Welcome! Some of you may have noticed that I no longer have a website, just some pages and my blog once again. Though I seem to have gained advertisements that I didn’t have before which I don’t like much. I was really pleased with my website but it was expensive just to have there for no good reason. It’s good not to have to worry about finding the money for it each year and it was a very Scottish themed website anyway, like many of my creations. I am not sure what changes I will make here; maybe something coastal, maybe not.

It’s a three storey house, so the views from our windows are up among the trees : )

It is my plan to start a new Textile Art blog because that is something I want to get into more and more. I want to experiment with fabric and paper and inks and dyes, though I have to get myself organised first. My art and sewing equipment got very mixed up in the move and needs a good sort out.

There have been times when I have wondered whether it is worth going on with this blog. I very much get the impression that although quite a few people are curious about English Paper Piecing and want to try it briefly to see what it involves, they don’t then want to do any more. I can understand why. It is labour intensive, usually done by hand because it has Y seams that are difficult to do with a machine, fairly repetitive and even the smallest project takes a long time to complete. However, it definitely lends itself to the Slow Stitch approach that people are finding is good for the soul. The beauty is in the process not the end product. It’s a little like gardening. You don’t really think of anything else except what is right in front of you as your work, moment to moment. It takes you away from yourself and all your worries. I do enjoy it for that reason.

It was always my intention with this blog to push EPP as far as it could go, to see what more I could do with it, over and above simple pattern making with a variety of shapes. However, I realise that I haven’t even scratched the surface yet. I have been making mainly Scottish themed mini quilts , quilts featuring houses and landscapes, mostly as wall hangings or for frames, trying out blocks that take my fancy and learning to add appliqué and embroidery to some of them. I also made the mistake of buying fabric for dozens of quilts I wanted to make and here I am, eight or nine years later, having completed only some of them.

So, the unfinished and still-to-be-started work will have to be completed and some of this blog will be about these, going forward. I will try to space these out a bit so it won’t feel like watching paint dry! In between I hope to do some of things I always intended to, though that will be more difficult now as I am trying to fit in other textile work and hoping to complete a novella that I started at the end of last year. AND I am living in a new place, so I have to get out sometime and meet somebody. I don’t know anyone here and I have never been to this part of England before, so I may post a little about what it is like to live here. Apparently in the summer months the tourists outnumber the residents! It is a very beautiful area, with spectacular cliff and sea views and once it is warm and sunny to go exploring, I will share some of them with you.

The village rooftops far below our house on the hill.

The roads are very frightening here, very steep, very narrow and very windy. On the road up to my house you have to do a three point turn at each bend, because not even a tiny car can get around the corner in one go. My husband’s car has a horrible habit of rolling backwards at the bends, so I have begun getting out of it and walking up to the door. My car is sitting in the drive and I think it will be there for some time while I try to pluck up courage to venture out in it. Every journey out has been a white knuckle ride so far and I am always relieved to get home. Driving where I used to live in, Scotland, was quite a sedate affair with not much traffic on the roads and the joy of free parking pretty much everywhere. Here, everyone seems to be in a desperate rush to be somewhere and you can’t stop anywhere without having to pay for it. I think I might try the bus.

Daisy (left) and Tay (right) on their first adventure outdoors

I kept my four cats indoors for six weeks and then took them out, two at a time, with harnesses on, (check out those tartan harnesses!) to explore the garden back and front and get used to all the new smells. I was worried that if they didn’t get to know what was ours and what would be their safe space, when they went out alone they would wander off and get lost. However, I needn’t have worried. It’s March, and although it is not as cold as Scotland, there is a brisk wind off the sea even when it is sunny. They venture out for about twenty minutes each day and rush back in to the warmth of the house.

This is a short post, I know, but it tells you I’m back and I hope it won’t as long before I have more to tell you and can post something that I have been working on

So, until then…

The view across the valley from my kitchen window

Ending and Beginning

Every room in my house has looked like this since October

Hello Everybody!

I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and managed to escape all this rain!

I have just a little time to squeeze in my last post of 2023 before everything changes. A new year and a new home. We move on the 15th January and it will certainly be strange to find myself on the English coast instead of in the Scottish countryside. I would have liked to be wandering about outside, looking hard at the things around me that will soon be gone forever, but we seem to have had nothing but wild winds and driving rain all through December. Another week and it will begin to settle, we are told. Let’s hope so.

We are packing and moving ourselves, something I have done many times but never this far, or with so much stuff. We can’t fit it all into a van at once, so while I have been packing endless boxes, my husband has been making multiple journeys South with our belongings, first with all our plants to his parents house for temporary safekeeping, and then with the first of our belongings into storage. Tonight he is on his way home after the third trip and we have two more trips to go. After we move in, we will set about gradually moving it out of storage again and into the house.

At the moment my husband has an hour and a half’s journey to collect the van, after which he drives an hour and a half back home again, spends about seven hours loading the van (in the rain) and then drives through the night, an eight hour journey, getting to the storage facility just as it opens. He then spends several hours unloading everything and then drives another eight hours home again (in the rain). Tonight being New Year’s Eve, at least he can look forward to a day off tomorrow. Usually he has to get up early and go back to work the next day. I am amazed at his resilience. I think I would pull over to the side of the road and weep.

It amazes me that it has taken all year to prepare a house for sale, to show it, sell it, and wait on tenterhooks for all the paperwork to go through successfully. When we finally get the keys to open our new front door, I won’t be able to believe it is actually happening. I have moved dozens of times in my life but never has it taken this long or been so hard.

There has been precious little time for sewing, not that I could focus on much for long anyway but I have a friend who wanted to give a few of my quilts to members of her family for Christmas. You may remember the four that she chose, below: 

‘Cat in a Garden Shed’:

‘Deer in the Garden’:

‘Deer in the Glen’:

This one didn’t have a sleeve on the back so I made one for her. I had originally intended to put it in a frame.

‘Sniffing the Air’:

This one needed to be in a square frame and it had to be grey. I eventually managed to find one online and popped it in. It is going to someone who has a new puppy, so it will definitely be appropriate.

And that, I am afraid, is the extent of the textile work I have done lately. I do miss working on something new though and can’t wait to unpack my fabric stash and rediscover what’s in there. I wonder if I will be putting boats and seabirds on my quilts in this coming year instead of Scottish hills and cottages. It’s going to be big adventure and I am both excited and a little anxious. I wonder how it will be.

So until my next post in January, I wish you all a very Happy New Year (just hours away now), and hope all good things come your way in 2024. Thank you for being here with me on this journey.

One my Christmas presents: New gardening gloves. Aren’t they beautiful? Much too lovely to get all covered in soil.

Changes in the Air at Forest Moor

Tulip tree

Hello Everyone!

Here I am, finally. I know I have been absent for a long while but we have trying to get this house and garden organised and sold. I am happy to report the house was sold in October and, soon after, we found a new place to live almost at the opposite end of the country, in North Devon in England. Our estimated move-in date was to be December 12th but due to some buyers in the chain preferring to wait until after Christmas to move, the estimated date is now January 15th. We were looking forward to celebrating Christmas in our new house, so that is a little disappointing but, ah well, at least now we have time to pack in a more leisurely fashion.

The colour is beautiful in our garden right now and so, as an homage to our soon-to-be-lost Forest Moor, I have filled this post with photos of our shrubs and trees wearing their wonderful autumn shades.

Japanese Acer

Our new house couldn’t be more different to this one, built into a rocky hillside high above a river and, as the estate agent puts it, a “brisk walk from the sea”. The garden is on a slope, a challenge we have not had before, with steep zig zagging paths down to the shops below. A particularly nice feature of the house is that it has a verandah where we can sit out under cover and admire the view far below.

There will be so many changes with this move: A change of lifestyle as we move from the Scottish countryside to a coastal town in England; a new job for my husband; a new garden for my cats who have lived here all their lives and have no idea there are faraway places to explore, and of course changes right here, to my website and blog.

Another Japanese Acer

I have been so happy with my website, its extra information and photos of my work and I once hoped to sell my work from there. However, it has not worked out the way I planned and I can’t afford to keep it going anymore. The website will disappear shortly but the blog will revert to a free blog roll again. ‘Forest Moor’ is the name of this house and the land around it. The name is tightly bound up with my life here in Scotland and the inspiration for ‘Forest Moor Designs’, the Scottish themed quilts I have worked on for the last eight or nine years. It won’t travel. It belongs here.

Yet another Japanese Acer

So, my blog roll address will alter from forestmoordesigns.com to englishpaperpiecingjourney.wordpress.com, or something close to that. I hope that, by turning the existing subtitle into the main address, the blog will be easy to find. It will continue as an English Paper Piecing blog for at least another year, as I still enjoy EPP and have many more quilts to finish. However, I do plan to start another blog which will be more more Art and Textile based: Pen and ink, paint, paper and fabric collage and stitch but not EPP related at all. And probably not at all Scottish. It will take us a while to settle in to our new home as there is a lot decorating to do, so I don’t expect that I will be thinking seriously about making a start on a new blog before mid-May. In any case I will post about it here before that. I hope many of you will come along on this new adventure with me.

Eunonymous Alatus

I haven’t worked on any quilts for months. My only sewing has been a pile of mending and a label for a quilt I plan to send to a friend. Most of my fabric and quilting materials are packed but as I began to sort through my work-in-progress quilts to pack them away safely, I had a sudden urge to work on some of them and if I am here until after Christmas….why not? I have spread them out across an empty bookshelf to see which of them clamours for attention (how strange the empty bookshelves and hooks on the walls where pictures used to hang).

Hydrangea (Lacecap)

This post is a quick update to let you know what’s going on with me at the moment and my plans for the near future. I hope to write another, fuller, post before Christmas, if I don’t get behind with my packing. We are not having a removals company move us. We are going to do it ourselves. My husband will deal with all the furniture and the plants and pots outside and tools in the barn and I will pack up all the rest. It’s going pretty well so far.

So, until next time…..

Cotoneaster

Summer Hiatus

The ‘Ghost Tree’ (Davidia involucrata) flowering in our garden.

It does seem strange not be sewing at all this summer but I am finding it too hard to focus on anything. Having the house up for sale means that I have to have it viewing-ready each morning, in case a phone call comes out of the blue. On one occasion I had a gut feeling there would be no call. I didn’t wash my hair because I wanted to go out and garden. I didn’t wash the breakfast dishes because I was in a hurry to go outside. I popped back in at lunchtime and the phone rang: Could someone view the property this afternoon, please. My worst nightmare had come true. Thankfully I managed to put off the viewing until the next day but each day since, I have felt compelled to prepare the house for a viewing before I think of doing anything else. And I can’t paint or sew or quilt because that will make a mess that I can’t clear away easily. It is fast becoming a strain!

A friend gifted me a white Forsythia which I am very excited about. I didn’t know they could be anything but yellow.

It has been a strange year so far in Scotland, weather wise, with a very cold spell early in Spring, which caused us to lose quite a few Fuchsias, even a few large ones over fifteen years old and some young ones in a pot. This was we followed by a very hot spell the burnt the tips of all the young leaves on our yellow leaved Acers.

My cats very much enjoyed the heat though!

Some of my Hydrangeas, too, have struggled to flower this year, which is unusual.

I haven’t fed this Hydrangea with ericaceous feed. It just turns up blue time after time.

Now with most of the heat firmly behind us, we have wind and rain. A LOT of rain. The garden looks a tad oppressive at this time of year and we haven’t been able spend long enough in it to make a difference. My husband has rebuilt the collapsing compost pens but even the grass is not getting cut as often as it needs to be to give the garden some semblance of order.

There is much to do to cut back overgrowth and clear weeds from the garden and to box up our belongings in the barn but the house, at least, is ready. All the early months clearing clutter, with visits to the charity shop and recycling centre and getting rid of unwanted things on Ebay, has paid off. The house is clean, tidy and calm. Everything has its place. Despite these best efforts we are beginning to think the house won’t sell this year. We were late getting it onto the market as my husband struggled to find the motivation to touch up paint, replace wood in the windows, repair small leaks and so on.

It’s wonderful to sit out in the garden in Spring, however briefly, when a little warm sunshine finally arrives.

We had a flurry of interest in our house in June and a couple of really generous offers. We got excited and thought we were on our way. We found a house we loved. And then suddenly both our offers were withdrawn; our viewers were looking for something else. Soon after, we lost our dream house to a cash buyer. Since then we have had people who are not gardeners who love the house but find the garden too big to manage. We have had gardeners who love the garden but find the house too small compared to what they have been used to, and we have had people unhappy about the windows, or the floors, or the expense involved in having to enclose the whole garden to prevent their dogs escaping. The negativity is wearing when all you want is one person to love your home.

As I can’t launch into anything messy, I have been spending much of my time online, finding new vegan recipes to try, looking at English Paper Piecing and embroidery patterns, buying some new books and enjoying reading some that are already on my bookshelves.

My daughter gave me the Nancy Nicholson embroidery kit, shown below, for my birthday in May, thinking it would be a project that would be easy to pick up and put down. I think it will be but for now I am too restless to make a start on it.

It’s a small pre-printed cotton and linen panel that comes with instructions, a needle and a bunch of coloured stranded cotton threads. This is what it looks like inside the box:

I expect most people start with basic kits like this but I have never bought one and look forward to some simple stitching that is already set out for me, as a relaxing change from inventing.

This led me to buy a long panel of linen in a sale, that has 12 area already drawn on, ready for embroidering in any way you wish. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them afterwards but they might make nice mini pictures for gifts at Christmas. These are designed by Natalie bird at the birdhouse.com.au but available in the UK at coastandcountrycrafts.co.uk

I also bought a English paper piecing pattern from coastandcountrycrafts.co.uk because I wanted to see how it was written with a view to writing my own one day, perhaps, and to see how easy it is to follow. It is just the pattern on its own. You can buy patterns with the necessary paper pieces included and sometimes the fabric too, but they are so, so, expensive.  Not buying the paper pieces means you can scale it up or down as it suits you.  I particularly liked this one for the appliquéd birds on it and the variety of shapes included. It includes three pages of instructions, a full page showing the layout of the finished quilt and actual size appliqué templates. I am quite pleased with that.

It’s funny that, at a time when I most want to go my own way and experiment more with textile art than   English paper piecing, that I am buying patterns to try. I do feel constantly drawn to it, especially if it includes things I have not yet tried. 

Talking of things not tried, I have always wanted to make something very tiny.

The whole thing is just 4″. The pattern comes with the pieces included, a perforated sheet of shapes. I am looking at this tiny triangles around the centre squares with horror. I can’t believe how fiddly this is going to be but I just have to try it. 

I like that I have some new, small projects to work on. I am hoping I can make a start on one of these without covering the floor, and myself, in threads as I usually do. 

In between all these new patterns discoveries, I have been reading. I love Flash Fiction but I have recently discovered Micro Fiction, which is a relative of Flash, but shorter, 300 words or less. I have bought several collections and I am studying them carefully. I have also started a Novella in Flash but that is resting for a while until I am ready to go back to it with fresh eyes. 

Another book that I am finding fascinating at the moment  is ‘An Absorbing Errand: How artists and inaftsmen make their way to mastery’ by Janna Malamud Smith. The blurb on the back explains that it “uses stories of artists’ lives, and insights from the authors work as a psychotherapist to examine the psychological obstacles that prevent people from staying with , and relishing, the process of art making.” Each chapter looks at a separate problem and how various artists have overcome them – from Julia Child and Charlie Chaplin to Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga – and how these very obstacles can be used to fuel the energy needed to overcome them. Fascinating stuff!

I realise this has been rather a long post but it may be a month or two before I post again, unless things change for the better. We’ll see how it goes.

So, until next time….

Inula (not sure which variety), are flowering madly in the garden at the moment.

Hexiform for English Paper Piecing – Something to Try?

There is nothing like a hill to lift the heart, especially with sunlight playing on it.

Hi Everyone,

Some of you may have noticed a comment on one of my pages from Colin and Suzi Argent. They have created a product called Hexiform, in Devon, England, (ashmeaddesigns.com), which they offer as an alternative to the use of paper pieces in English paper piecing. In their comment they tell me that they would “like to add to your (my) story regarding the history of EPP and bring it up to date.” My initial reaction was well, I don’t know about that. For me English paper piecing is the practice of a traditional craft akin to Gentle Work or Slow Stitching which isn’t looking to be “brought up to date”, as if it is somehow unworthy as it is.

That said, I do appreciate that there are people out there who want to work faster, and who like to finish a project in a weekend, and I guess this will suit them. There are also people who want to experiment with EPP briefly and this offers them a less labour intensive taste of it. I’m told “it appeals to a lot of people who tell us they didn’t try EPP because they didn’t want the hassle of taking the papers out!” I absolutely love the handle and rustle of the papers in each of my EPP quilts, especially the larger ones, and can’t wait for the stage when I pop out all the papers and finally get to feel the soft flexibility of the finished quilt top. For me, this is part of the appeal of this technique.

I often struggle to understand the people who want the look of something handmade without the work required to create it; often the same people who wonder why the quality and beauty of our traditional crafts have disappeared. So many people are no longer prepared to put in long hours for hand made work done in the traditional way. It’s all about speed and short cuts. We have wooden windows in our old house, (built in 1880) that need to be maintained each year to keep rot at bay in our wet climate. We could just put plastic ones in and be done with it but the whole point is to have windows in keeping with the age of the house, for authenticity and out of a respect for tradition. I feel it is important to approach my quilted projects in the same way. However, this is just my opinion and other people must be allowed their own.

I am not sure if Hexiform will be for me but Colin and Suzi kindly sent me a packet of 1″ hexagons free of charge, which I appreciate, and I have promised to give the product a try and blog about what I discover. I may be completely won over. Let’s see. What follows are a list of advantages and disadvantages I went on to glean from Ashmead Designs’ own website and the Tube video ‘Paper or Hexiform for English Paper Piecing? Top tips for using both’ by Emma Jones of Vintage Sewing Box.

Advantages are:

Hexiform provides body: The inserts are “a fabric combination” like a stabiliser, which, unlike paper pieces that have to be removed, stay in and lend more body to your work. I am curious about how much body they give and whether their plumpness might interfere with the soft draping that you can get from quilts that use just a simple cotton batting.

To be fair the makers say this did not originally intend it to be used for quilts but noticed that people began using it for this purpose. Looking at their website, it seems that they intended it originally for smaller projects that need more structure and ‘puff’ like purses, pincushions, needle-keeps and Christmas decorations. It is not clear whether using Hexiform shapes mean that batting is no longer required or whether it is still advisable to use both. I suppose it depends on whether you want a thin quilt or a thicker one. Batting is usually used as a single sheet behind the EPP, giving a uniform body across it, whereas I wonder if individual Hexiform shapes attached to a backing fabric will move differently, perhaps with a propensity to ripple? Perhaps it will depend how they are attached to it.

Hexiform can be used effectively in appliqué: I would certainly like to give this a try. I imagine that an appliqué with a Hexiform base will keep its shape more easily while you stitch around it. There are wash-away appliqué sheets available from C & T Publishing (25 sheets in a pack), where you cut your own shapes that can be used for appliqué, with the same advantages, but this washes out later for a softer end result. It is stiffer to begin with though.

Hexiform prevents shadowing: Those visible turned in seam allowances once papers are removed, which can be a problem when using solid colours or fine fabrics like Liberty Tana Lawn, are hidden by Hexiform inserts.

Hexiform is easier on the hands: Sewing with stiff paper can be hard on the hands in a way Hexiform is not, because it is is softer and easier to bend and manipulate while whip stitching.

Hexiform is fully washable: However, I wonder the surface of each of the shapes remains slightly raised where the Hexiform has been left in.

Hexiform Sheets can be used successfully in Cricut Maker and Sizzex die cutting machines: says Emma Jones in her EPP YouTube video https://youtu.be/Kyyjmmdxk90. You can also create your own designs on these sheets and cut them out.

Hexiform allows you to embroider straight into it: I love this idea as you can’t do this with paper. The hexiform layer will hold your stitches and prevent them showing through to the front.

Hexiform offers a huge variety of pre-cut shapes (see image below) and is apparently particularly well suited to curved shapes and very tiny 1/4″ shapes from which it can be extremely fiddly to remove papers without damaging them. Despite what the name, and the 1″ hexagon sample pack sent to me suggested, I am glad to see that it’s not all about the hexagon. Special orders are welcome too and that it always a plus.

The product is, I am told, “globally unique” : The makers currently sell to 36 different countries including wholesale to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.

Disadvantages are:

Hexiform shapes are not re-usable: They stay in your project and you buy more for your next project.

Hexiform can be expensive: Your project may end up costing much more because you have to buy them, either in sheets are as packs of pre-cut shapes. Pre-cut Hexiform packs cost more (£7 for a pack of 60 x 1″ hexagons – though they pay the VAT and there is no charge for postage) and more than the regular pre-cut paper pieces which can be re-used several times (£3.30 for a pack of 100 x 1″ hexagons + £2.50 postage from linapatchwork.com). Hexiform is not for crafters strapped for cash. One of the wonderful things about EPP using paper is that it is accessible to any experimenter who cannot afford a sewing machine or to be able buy a large amount of paper or fabric inserts, because they can make their own from old envelopes, calendars and cards found around their own homes.

Hexiform has to be quilted to be held in place: Emma Jones doesn’t elaborate on this in her YouTube video (see above), so I am wondering if the Hexiform shapes can be dislodged if not quilted over to secure them.This is not an issue with papers because they are removed.

Pre-cut Hexiform shapes are not yet widely available in Europe: This is a problem due to Brexit but the makers are working on changing this.

The image above shows a close up of each side of a Hexiform 1″ hexagon piece, so that you can more clearly see that each shape has a woven side(shown on the left) and a non-woven, slightly more fluffy side (shown on the right). The non-woven side is placed against your fabric because it has more ‘tooth’ to grip the fabric below it. I must say these pieces do feel very soft compared with the wash-away appliqué sheets that I have. They do seem to have body without being ultra firm.

As I am writing this post I am coming to realise that Hexiform is not necessarily a replacement for an old technique at all, more an addition to it. It’s not about bringing it more “up to date” as much as offering another string to an old bow. I imagine it will be better suited to some types of projects than others.

As many of you know I am in the midst of selling up and moving to a different part of the UK at the moment, so it will be a wee while before I can experiment with Hexiform in any useful way; perhaps closer to the end of the year.

In my next post I will tell you more about what I have been up to this summer but I wanted to get this post out first, for anyone who may be interested in trying Hexiform but also in case anyone who has already tried it would like to leave us a comment here, telling us what they made and how they found working with it, whether they found it preferable to working with paper or just different. After all it’s not just about what I think. What do you think?

Although I have not been sewing over the summer, I will be back soon with some everyday news, as well as a peek at new EPP and embroidery patterns and a bit about a book I am rather taken with.

Tell next time…..

NB: Stitchers in Australia may like to to know that eco/recycled papers are available for EPP from Tales of Cloth. My thanks to Emma Jones for that information.

Talking of shapes, this is a photo of the Kalmia latifolia, or Mountain Laurel, that I have in our greenhouse, taken when it was flowering earlier in the summer. Aren’t the flowers and flower buds amazing shapes?

How to Use your EPP Quilt – Let Me Count the Ways…

‘Deer in the Forest’

When people see me with my mini quilts I am asked, over and over again, “what are you supposed to do with them?” That question always takes me by surprise. What makes people ask that?

Is it because, here in Britain, fabric was historically quilted to use for warm clothing, or patched together for bedding, while the American tradition of quilt making passed down through generations, and continued into modern times, is not something we do here? Is it to do with our soggy climate? Do people think they will get damp or spoil? That a wall is not a place for fabric decoration? Is it because hand made items are not valued highly enough? Is it because they think quilts are not practical; that they need a lot of care? I wonder.

People ARE quilting here. Charm packs are being bought, droves of people are attending Quilt Festivals, paper pieces are being bought, quilt patterns are being followed and yet the only quilt I have ever seen in anyone’s house belonged to an American. So, what are all our UK quilters doing with their quilts? And why are non-quilters so puzzled about what to do with them?

I am assuming most quilts are still being made for adult beds and, given the time and cost involved in buying and making them, perhaps they are jealously guarded. Maybe a great many are never finished. I have noticed some being sold on ebay and Etsy but these are mostly baby quilts. These at least don’t take as long to make and are more practical to use but what happens to the quilt after the baby outgrows it? Is it valued and passed on, or put in the cat/dog basket, or (shock horror) thrown away?

‘Tumbling Blocks’

I made this Tumbling Block quilt for my first born when I was in my twenties and it remains of huge sentimental value. I don’t have grandchildren so I don’t know if I would part with it for another child in the family. I think it’s unlikely. Every stitch in the quilt was a tiny step closer to the day my daughter arrived. I made it in green because I didn’t know if my baby was going to be a boy or a girl. I made a floor quilt for my son two years later, also from Laura Ashley fabric. I decorated the rows of six inch squares with large letters that said, ‘Rock Abye Baby on the Tree Top” followed by a row of trees along the bottom. The letters and the trees were felt and couldn’t be washed, so the quilt didn’t survive. I didn’t know how to piece letters in those days. I think of it sometimes and wish I could see it again. Now I take photos of what I make, back then I didn’t even own a camera.

I didn’t start making quilts again for another thirty five years and the quilts I make now are mostly decorative. However, they are as long lasting as any picture on the wall and, unlike pictures, they are washable. We are so spoilt now with the information we have at our fingertips whether it be on Youtube or Pinterest, or from blog posts or in one of the many books on quilting.There should be dozens of ideas out there, suggesting what you can do with a quilt of any size.

Here are a few of my ideas in a brief attempt to answer that question, “What are you supposed to do with them?”

The most obvious is probably as a Table Topper, a term which means more than the way it sounds. For example, you could put your table topper on a deep windowsill:

‘The Hut on Butterfly Hill’

or use it to show off an object, or a vase of flowers on a small table, or lay it below a lamp, candlestick or other small seasonal display:

‘Circle of Friends’

‘Thistle Cottage’

‘Pine Jam’

You could use it to display an antique doll or a much loved bear:

‘Chequerboard’ with Liberty Squares

You could add some interest to a plain tray:

‘Coastal Cottage’

‘Sniffing the Air’

Or put one in a basket:

‘Dog Log’

‘House Row’

‘Night Owl’

‘Evening in Japan’

A really effective way is to put one on a quilt hanger. This works for tiny quilts as well as much larger ones. Small quilt hangers are fairly inexpensive but the larger, more decorative, ones can be pricy here in the UK. They are sturdy and long lasting though and don’t rust, so perhaps they are worth the money for the elegance they can bring to a quilt:

‘Deer in the Garden’

‘Country Garden’

Quilt stands are harder to come across in the UK, and take up more surface space, but make a lovely addition to a hearth stone by a fireplace. If there is a sleeve on the back of the quilt you can slip it onto the split metal bar at the top, if not, you can tie it on with ribbon as I have:

‘All Roads Lead Home’

Another lovely way to display a quilt is in a frame, either on the wall or propped up on a desk or cabinet.

‘The Wind in the West’

‘In the Gloaming’

A cheaper and fun, modern, way of displaying a tiny quilt is on an easel. These are easily found on Ebay in several different colours. They make wonderful gifts in a pair like this:

‘Windblown’

Another more modern idea is to attach your mini quilt to a framed piece of chicken wire. I found this one in raw wood on Ebay and painted it. It has two metal rings at each corner of the back for attaching to hooks on the wall. I haven’t hung mine up yet. It’s just leaning against my whiteboard. It’s a fun idea. As the quilt is tied on with ribbon (or could be secured with mini plastic pegs) you could have a seasonal change of quilt! A similar idea is to attach it to a tobacco basket but they are harder to find and quite expensive.

‘How much is that doggie in the window?’

Other ideas are the more obvious over-the-back-of something, a chair, bench or sofa, or the top of the staircase or just propped up on the mantelpiece. I know that in America you can buy purpose-built quilt stands and quilt ladders but I have never seen those for sale here.

I hope these ideas are useful. If you can think of more, please tell me me about it in a comment below. It would be great to hear of others I haven’t thought of.

Until next time…

A mini cacti flower, just opened in our sunroom

One (Slow) Step at a Time

Wigtown Bay, ten minutes or so from where I live.

Hello Everybody,

It’s early May and Spring is still struggling to bring us warmth and sunshine but small glimpses are beginning to show, here and there.

For this post I am moving away from saying any more about the early unfinished quilts that I have been hoarding for so long and trying to complete. I will work my way through them eventually. Today I have returned to more recent ones in progress, trying to get as many as possible finished before we move house.

You would never think we were supposed to be moving house this year. I am waiting for my husband to finish some jobs around the house and garden and to clear the barn of things he has accumulated over the years and I’m getting so frustrated with the time it is taking. This is a very busy time of year at work for him and he is so physically and mentally frazzled by the time he gets home late in the evening, there neither the time nor the motivation to do anything. Days off are spent recovering. I do understand and try to sympathise but months are going by and the delay is becoming a strain. My focus has been on readying the house for viewing, not making a mess anywhere, keeping stuff in place, selling and giving away things we no longer need and keeping some of the garden under control. This has been my goal since the beginning of the year and I’m ready to get this house sold. It doesn’t feel as if there is time to start any new or large project. Except now there is a delay. Sometimes I think the delay doesn’t really matter; that what will be will be and I can certainly work on a few little quilts now and then while I wait. Taking time out to complete these has definitley made me feel better.

Note to Self: Just deal with it one step at a time.

Before I show you these quilts I want to tell you about something I came across online by accident and if you have not heard of it before, perhaps you will be interested. I wonder if you have heard of Hari-Kuyo, the Japanese Festival of Broken Needles? It is celebrated in February in one region of Japan and in December in another region but there the difference ends. Hari-Kuyo (Hari=needle and Kuyo = memorial) brings women to shrines each year, to remember the sewing needles broken in their work over the year and to pray for better skills. The Japanese show great respect for objects and like to honour small things for the service rendered by them. This festival allows women to thank their broken needles for their help and service and to acknowledge the part played by these indispensable tools in their individual achievements. Isn’t that wonderful? I completely identify with this practice, having always felt respect towards the things I own, keeping them cleaned and polished in return for the pleasure they give me.

Here are the quilts I have completed in the last week or two, Fittingly the first one has a Japanese theme. I have called it ‘Evening in Japan’ as it is made from Japanese Shibori patterned cotton from a charm pack and some off-white cotton. I wanted to use quilting stitches to have the ‘moon’ shine down on a little group of houses but I am not sure if the quilting stitches around the houses works. What do you think? Would the houses look better plain, without an ‘aura’ of stitches?

‘Evening in Japan’ 10 1/2″ x 19″

This is the back; little bursts of light with a mix of navy and white quilting stitches, as on the front:

Moda Shibori ‘Karamatsu’ for the back of ‘Evening in Japan’

The next one is ‘Once Upon A Chicken’. This was made to raise a smile but also as a celebration of all the chickens rescued from battery farms lately that have found good homes. Most of them had never seen grass before. Another question though. Would the quilt look nicer without the hen in the centre octagon?

‘Once Upon a Chicken’ from a Moda charm pack with some other added fabric.

This is the back. A whole space full of happy chickens.

‘Once Upon a Chicken’ is 15 inches square. My quilts are always odd shapes because I don’t think ahead to how big I want them to be when they are finished. Their size tends to rely on the size of paper pieces I have available at home and whether I then add borders and/or binding. Then later when I want them to fit in a frame, or on a tray, or in a basket, or on a sewing box, I wonder why I didn’t make them to fit.

Note to self: Make your quilts fit something more practical!

After these two larger ones, which both need a label and a good press before I put them away, I completed a couple of smaller ones. The first, ‘Scottish Country Garden’ and is an 8 inch square textile picture. Our gardens in this part of Scotland are visited by rather too many deer and hares.

‘Scottish Country Garden’. My garden is just an outdoor salad bar for wandering families of deer and hares.

I am not too pleased with this one. The smaller ones are always harder to piece. The next one is one of a series of ‘Guardian’ quilts I made during Covid. This is ‘Wishing Star’:

‘Wishing Star’ – 9″ square mini wall quilt

The back is the same black, white and gold plaid as the binding. Bindings always need a good press when they are done because folding them over the edge of the quilt edge to stitch them down makes them buckle slightly. Pressing gently flattens the binding to the even measurement you have allowed all the way around. I was so glad to get these finished I didn’t think of pressing them before taking the photo.

I feel another note to self coming up!

Finally, here is a quilt I have been battling with for some time, ‘ Frost in the Forest.’ This quilt was promised to someone more than a year ago (you know who you are!) but has given me more headaches than any other quilt I’ve tackled. This is one of the problems that comes with experimenting with something you have never done before. Sometimes it works and sometimes you have to find other ways to make it work. So, a little about this as yet, still unfinished quilt:

I thought it might be fun to cut out trees and superimpose them on fabric for a lacy look. The challenge was how to stitch them down in an unobtrusive way and how to stop their thin ‘branches’ fraying and falling apart as you stitch.

The answer is you can’t. I don’t like to use glue, so I decided just to stitch them down the best way I could with small stab stitches to keep them in place and that perhaps some embroidery stitches, used in a creative way later, would make the holding stitches less obvious. The photo above shows the tress stitched down. The white area will eventually have white batting behind it. This will allow both the visible seam allowances and transparent areas to disappear from view and become evenly white.

I had a small square of the blue fabric left to use for the back of the quilt. And then one day I laid the front of the quilt down onto the blue and was amazed how a slim blue border around the quilt transformed it completely. It was as though you were looking through a window to the forest beyond. I loved the difference it made.

‘Frost in the Forest’ – eventual size about 14″ square

I decided to stitch the quilt onto the blue piece of fabric to allow for a border all the way around, and to just use white on the back. However, putting the white front directly onto the blue caused the blue to show through. It turned the white inner areas pale blue while drawing attention to the thicker inner hems that remained stubbornly white.

The only way to solve this problem was to replace the blue fabric with white fabric behind the front layer and cut up the blue fabric to create the borders. That raised yet another problem. If I cut strips across the fabric the trees would not all be facing same the way up on each border. I would have to cut around the edges but the fabric wasn’t a true square. I wasn’t sure the borders would fit as I had only had a small piece to work with and EPP necessitates larger seam allowances than regular quilting.

It may seem a bit odd having a row of tree stumps around the bottom but all that is left now is a 9″x 3″ rectangle and I can’t do anything with that. I tried to buy more of the same fabric but it was no longer available. It would have been nice to match the fabric at the each corner of the bottom border so that the top of the trees fitted with the bottoms. Even now I am not sure all the borders will fit the quilt. I have left a generous seam allowance at each end as a safety measure. Otherwise, making the side borders narrower might help. We will soon see.

On the plus side I know how I am going to quilt it and I have some lovely matching blue thread. I have found a white fabric with minuscule white tone on tone dots, like falling snow, for the back. Now I have to do something with those two trees in the foreground and get the borders sewn on. Then perhaps I can get it sent to the person who has been waiting so long and so patiently for it.

I have begun three more quilts while I am thinking about this one. This stops me getting too anxious about it and allows thoughts and ideas to percolate.

There is so much more I want to show you than my stash of quilts in progress – from how to make 3D pieces using EPP to how to make fabric bead embellishments – but it will have to wait a little longer.

Until next time….by which time I hope we are all enjoying wonderful weather!

A posy of Spring flowers from a friend as a thank you for letting her help herself to anything from my garden to make her wreaths last Christmas. A lovely thought and so appreciated. They smell heavenly.

A Flurry of EPP Along With the Snow

Hello Everyone,

We’ve had snow! It didn’t hang around for long though and now we are have rain and more rain. However Spring is not far off and we need to hang on just a little longer.

Since my last post I have been continuing to work on the patterns and fabrics that have been hanging around my sewing room for years. I am determined that the tops of these, at least, are going to completed this year. After the ones I have to show you today, I am down to the last half dozen, each of which need more papers or more fabric or something else I don’t have, though this doesn’t include the pile of more recently begun Scottish themed mini wall quilts, each of them about eight inches square. There are quite a few of those but, for now, I am pretending they don’t exist and have hidden them in a drawer.

While I was checking through my pile of work in progress, I came across these. I quite like tiny tumbler shapes and may have thought they might make attractive rings in Liberty fabric. I have an idea that I might use them to make a meandering path from somewhere to somewhere else, like those games we moved our counters along when we were children.

Talking of children, there are just two more of my Children’s quilts left to put together. One is called ‘Winners Circle’ and features rows of horses, each one different from the other. I made one of the blocks but have now decided to make the horses smaller. The paper pieces I bought for the design between each block are now the wrong size so this quilt will have to go to the back of the queue for now.

The other is ‘Calico Cats’ and here it is, ready to piece together:

The cat fabric on the right will be used for the surrounding border and the fabric at the bottom is for the back of the quilt.

Stashed away in a plastic box I had a Moda Mini Charm Pack that needed using up and a fat quarter of fabric from the same line, which resulted in these two mini quilts:

This is ‘Circle of Friends’ (above) and ‘Mixed Bag’ (below). They both look rather wobbly but that will come right once the pieces are sewn together and a spot of multi coloured big stitch quilting will jazz up the flat grey around the little creatures.

I also had two of the larger Moda Charm Packs hanging around and thought I might use them to work with shapes I haven’t tried before. So, here is the beginnings of ‘A Musical Affair’ in octagons, which I think will become be a runner.

And here is ‘Zen Chic’, a small table topper in elongated hexagons. I have some matching fabric that I could use as a border (shown below) but I think it’s too fussy. I think I will use a solid or tone on tone fabric that matches one of the colours in the quilt instead, perhaps the purple.

Another charm pack I had was’ Country Life’ (shown below). I am a bit obsessed by circular patterns at the moment, so I have used it to make a ‘Circle of Country Friends’ who are scattered around this silver grey fabric. I expect that it will not have escaped your notice that I like to use shades of grey as background fabrics, ha ha. I think they allow lighter or brighter colours to pop forwards. The square in the centre looks a bit lonely, doesn’t it? Perhaps the quilting will liven it up.

I have five more charm pack quilts in progress but as this post is getting rather long, I will show you those in my next post.

Below is a pattern I really love and another of my favourite circular patterns. I have quite a few shapes in paper templates so I laid the pattern out on my desk. It is worth having a few packets of different shaped papers to be able to move the pieces around and design your own patterns. It’s less tedious than drawing them.

I want to fussy cut a hare, or rabbits or birds into each of the house shapes that rotate around the centre and add in other coordinating fabrics that will lend it a woodland theme. This will be quite a large quilt (about 36 inches square) and actually a size I am beginning to like more and more. Room for a little more drama!

I have collected fabrics for three different variations of this quilt and I like them all so much, I am tempted to make three versions of the same quilt. I haven’t done that before. Here they are, Winter Hare, Spring Rabbit and Little Birds. Which one do you like?

I think these are quite enough quilts for one day, or I will risk boring you to death. If you ever have any questions, please ask. I will try my best to answer them.

I hope that by the time my next post is ready, the sun will be shining and warming us all up. Until then, keep cosy and keep stitching!

What looks like white roses, in the photo above, are just blobs of snow that happened to collect on the top of our azaleas. They melted away within half an hour of taking this picture, so I caught them just in time

The EPP Coverlet, 1718. Making a Replica

Hi Everyone,

Imagine someone sitting with a needle and threads and an idea for a quilt, wrapping papers with fabric and sewing 182 blocks together, hour upon hour, until the quilt was complete. Imagine that this was long ago, before the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, before there was electricity, when travel was arduous and shopping for fabric was difficult. Imagine the quilt was made mainly in silk and the maker added a block just above centre, initialed and dated, E H 1718. Imagine if you were this person. Could you conceive for one moment that your quilt would survive, albeit a little frail, to appear at auction over 300 years later and be revealed to the world as the oldest known, dated, piece of patchwork in Britain?

Sadly, despite extensive research, it has not been possible to discover who EH was but what a wonderful gift it is for us to see today, with its mixture of sixty nine geometric and figurative patterns; a man and a woman, a variety of animals, some heraldic designs, hearts and flowers – and all the papers still left in it!

The coverlet was bought in early 2000 by the Quilters Guild of the British Isles, who proceeded to conserve the quilt as best they could. However, because its delicate condition meant it had to be kept in the dark, in humidity controlled storage, and could not withstand being on display, the conservation process gave rise to the making of a full size replica of the original quilt. It was completed in 2004.

The replica project also inspired a book, released in 2014, which allows people like us to replicate the quilt ourselves if we choose to do so, or even just part of it – our favourite blocks – via the original hand stitched method or by machine, using modern fabrics of our choice.

It is perhaps worth remembering that the the maker’s original technique, now often referred to as English Paper Piecing, used to be called Mosaic Patchwork. It only became known as English Paper Piecing once the technique became popular in America very much later. Also it should be noted that the ‘quilt’ is referred to here as a coverlet because it doesn’t have any wadding between the decorated front and the backing fabric.

So, why am I telling you all this? It’s mainly because I noticed this book on Amazon a while ago and thought it was just about the history of an old quilt, followed by instructions on how to copy it. And of course it is, but when I eventually bought it, I discovered there is so much more of interest between its covers and it’s not just for lovers of Mosaic Patchwork and EPP

There are chapters of a few pages at the beginning outlining the history of the coverlet; the conservation process; the means used to replicate the quilt; a layout and numbering system for each block; the fabrics and materials originally used and what you would need to consider if you wanted to use the closest equivalents available.

Later chapters cover a variety of techniques in detail, both original and modern (so you can use your rotary cutter and sewing machine if you prefer) and the adding of the usual backing, borders, label and so on that might be needed. Then there is a numbered directory of every block accompanied by a coloured picture, followed by a separate page of instructions for every single block showing both the original and modern methods of completing it. All the block diagrams are given in their actual size.

The points I think are important to take away from this blog post are:

1. You don’t have to be an English Paper Piecer to learn from this book. There is a huge amount of guidance here for making a various types blocks by hand or machine.
2. You can choose any number of blocks to make your own quilt or wall hanging. Look at the banner below! This banner, inspired by the coverlet is called ‘Cantata’ and was made by Maureen Poole.
3. I am not sure there are any EPP books that tackle figurative work as comprehensively as this one. Books on EPP generally cover only geometric patterns.
4. I had previously only seen people or animal blocks for quilts made out of geometric shapes but this book shows you how to tackle unusual shapes, curves and points and incorporate them into a block in a way that I would previously have thought too difficult to piece. I think it could teach experienced English Paper Piecers a thing or two.

Just to clarify what I mean by this last point, here is a page from one of Gwen Marston’s early books, ‘Twenty Little Patchwork Quilts’ featuring four ‘girls’ alongside the ‘Woman’ featured on the coverlet. I love how much more realistic and natural looking the second pieced block is.

I will back soon with more of my quilts in progress. I just felt that this book needed to be celebrated for the less obvious and special information that it contains.

So, until next time…

Toppers and Logs

We have had some misty mornings lately at Forest Moor

Hi Everyone,

I once read that, in quilting circles, Toppers are people who enjoy all the designing and piecing of tops of quilts and then leave them to languish, incomplete , while they go on to make another top. It’s true that quilting and binding a quilt is not as much fun but that’s when you really see it coming together and beginning to look like a proper quilt.

Lately, I have been working very much as a Topper, going through each of my fabrics and patterns-in-waiting, cutting out the shapes of fabric needed and wrapping all the paper pieces. Then I put them back in their respective boxes. The idea is I can pick any box and begin piecing; all the bits are there, ready to sew. I managed to do all but two of the medium sized quilts because the last two need either more fabric or more paper pieces.

I’ll show you some in this post, the ones that are predominantly about working with strips of fabric, whether long strips for sashing or shorter strips like those found in log cabin blocks. The others will keep for a later post as I don’t want to overwhelm you! I have photographed the tops on my desk, laid out in their pattern but not yet sewn together:

This post mostly concerns working with strips of fabric, very long strips for sashing (the strips of fabric between quilt blocks to space then out) and shorter strips like those found in log cabin blocks

For anyone who might not know, the log cabin is much loved traditional quilt block that is built from the centre outwards, adding longer pieces as you go. The centre represents the hearth of the home, often shown in a red fabric, while the logs represent the wooden walls of the ‘cabin’. There are many variations in the number and size of logs and blocks can be short and fat or tall and thin. Some quilts are made up of a single large log cabin block, while others might use multiples of the same block.

I have had four log cabin ideas waiting to be made for about a decade now. It makes me cringe writing that; realising how long it’s been. One is a long panel, a lovely ‘ Princess and the Pea’ print that I want to make into a log cabin design but haven’t decided whether I will, as all those logs arranged around the centre make for long and tedious sewing time. The panel would sit in the space numbered 1 in the diagram below and logs of various widths of fabric would work outwards from there.

I also had two log cabin quilt ideas for children but I have given up on the design I originally planned for these, just to get the quilts done faster. In the first one below, I have done away with layers of ‘logs’ in favour of a Framed One Patch design, taken from ‘Quilts for Baby’ by Ursula Reikes, using a fun safari fabric. The green fabric you can just see on the far left will make a wide border around the centre frames. This is now much more do-able and not nearly as much sewing time.

The second child’s quilt has morphed into a pattern called ‘Barney’s Block’, using the same safari fabric but in a different colour way (more browns and rusts, fewer yellows and greens and with shorter logs and squares.

It looks rather dull at the moment but will be framed in fabric of the same bright orange yellow squares as the giraffes you see here, so that should brighten it up quite a bit! This pattern is from ‘Even More Quilts for Baby by Ursula Reikes.

My next quilt top is a variation of the Log Cabin design, called ‘Courthouse Steps’. In this block the logs are arranged differently, as in the diagram below:

I have been avoiding this one for years, even though I had all the fabric, because of the amount of sewing involved (even cutting out all the logs takes ages) but now I have begun I am rather pleased with it. I have called it ‘Temple Window’ because it reminds me of one I saw once, in Nepal. All the pieces are wonky in the photo below but once they are all sewn together, I think it will look nice. I don’t really need that second strip of red and blue that runs between the top and bottom two blocks, but I quite like it, so I am leaving it like that for now. In fact I have decided to add another five blocks to make it a much larger square for the wall, except that means even more cutting and sewing (sigh).

Once upon a time I bought four or five Charm Packs, and as many Mini Charm Packs, all so easy to fall in love with and buy. But then you have to use them. This one was a charm pack by Moda called ‘Sphere’ and the pattern is ‘Amanda’ from ‘3 Times the Charm (Book II)’ by Me and My Sisters. In the early days I bought books and followed patterns which I don’t do anymore, but I want to complete these quilts as far as possible in the way I intended them because they were part of that time.

The original pattern has a series of larger rectangles in the same fabric that frame the pattern above but that makes it look VERY busy, so I have decided to add a border of blue between the pattern the outer row of rectangles, to soften the overall brightness a little.

In addition to many the toppers I began this January, I also added to earlier incomplete quilts. Do you remember this mermaid, ‘Attic Window’ design? The first photo shows all the completed blocks sitting on my desk, the second shows the paper pieces that will make up the sashing and the third shows the fabric sashing in place.

You will notice that the sashing strips are a little too long. This is so I can adjust them to the right size later. Strip lengths have a habit of shifting slightly when you are sewing and if you have cut them too short you’re in trouble!

Another thing you might notice is that the paper sashing in the middle picture is made up of lots of short pieces. All kinds of shapes are available from sellers of English Paper Piecing papers but no long strips. It took a while for it to dawn on me that I could make my own by sellotaping pieces together. If I need an 8″ strip I could sellotape two 3″ pieces and a 2″ piece together or two 4″ pieces. Later they can be cut apart again and re-used.

So that’s it for today. More to come soon and then all I have to do is sew all the pieces together. Hmm, I think that could take a year or two! It’s time; they have been hanging around far too long and I have so many, very different, ideas of my own that I am itching to get to.

I hope you are all well and keeping cosy. Spring is not far away!

Till next time….